


i swear (i'll be around for you)

by Alice_not_in_Wonderland



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Dream Smp, Dream Team SMP Spoilers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fundy needs a hug, Gen, Ghostbur, Grief/Mourning, Post-Manberg-Pogtopia War on Dream Team SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Queerplatonic Relationships, bc screw social norms!, dream and fundy are engaged but not in a romantic relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27750925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alice_not_in_Wonderland/pseuds/Alice_not_in_Wonderland
Summary: "I hate him," Fundy mutters, his hands tightening on clumps of grass until the blades twist and rip out of the ground, going limp and wet against the skin of his hands.Dream makes a small noise of acknowledgment but not surprise, mask twisted to look somewhere in the distance across one of the few horizons unmarred with strange cobblestone fixtures and buildings and glowing torches. He sounds almost unbothered, like he's heard the quiet admission a million times, even though it's the first time that he's let the words leave his lips. Maybe Fundy should be offended by how easily he's dismissed, but compared to everyone else's reactions (Phil, ever unsure how to talk to a grandson he hasn’t seen in a decade, Tommy, angry and still grieving his brother, Technoblade, unreadable and absent and terrifying), all he feels is relief.---Wilbur is dead, and Wilbur is back, and Fundy just really wants someone to be There for him, for once.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Floris | Fundy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 132





	i swear (i'll be around for you)

**Author's Note:**

> fundy on the smp makes me cry 
> 
> tw/cw : dreamSMP spoilers, abandonment issues, canonical character death, anxiety, implied emotional neglect, blood (it's like referenced in one line), ghosts, grief, mourning, complicated parent/child relationships, crying, anger, implied insanity, loneliness

"I hate him," Fundy mutters, his hands tightening on clumps of grass until the blades twist and rip out of the ground, going limp and wet against the skin of his hands.

Dream makes a small noise of acknowledgment but not surprise, mask twisted to look somewhere in the distance across one of the few horizons unmarred with strange cobblestone fixtures and buildings and glowing torches. He sounds almost unbothered, like he's heard the quiet admission a million times, even though it's the first time that he's let the words leave his lips. Maybe Fundy should be offended by how easily he's dismissed, but compared to everyone else's reactions (Phil, ever unsure how to talk to a grandson he hasn’t seen in a decade, Tommy, angry and still grieving his brother, Technoblade, unreadable and absent and terrifying), all he feels is relief.

"I know I shouldn't," he continues, lifting his hand up and letting the grass fall, watching as it rides the wind to fly behind him, "But I'm so, so angry, you know? He may be a ghost now, and maybe he's a bit more like the Wilbur I remember, but he's still  _ wrong _ . He still  _ left. _ "

"Yeah," Dream's voice is calm, quiet. "I know."

"And- he doesn't even remember me, not really." His right hand comes up and runs through his hair, combing it back roughly. "He says the last time he remembers me was the elections when I said I was running against him, and then we got in an argument and then he's saying that the last time he remembers me was when I was fourteen. Fourteen!" A laugh leaves his lips in a sharp whoosh of breath, before all of the anger and frustration and spite seeps out of him and into the ground, leaving his chest strangely empty. "I've grown up without him."

_ He made me grow up without him. _

Dream reaches, hesitantly, and Fundy leans towards his hand. His fiancé reaches to rub at the base of his ears, carefully thumbing through his fur, and he can feel his breaths begin to steady.

"I'm sorry," he says, and it's simple, earnest. It's an apology for helping Schlatt, helping Wilbur, sympathy for him after losing his father; it's devoid of all of the usual pity and lack of understanding and he's grateful, that Dream doesn't expect anything of him. Fundy's glad he proposed, even though everyone knows that their relationship will never be anything romantic. Everyone on the server had always been fine with flying in the face of societal norms, and having someone- anyone, to be there when it seemed like nobody else would- was nice.

"Eret didn't even come, today," he whispers, eyes squeezing shut. "Everyone leaves."

The feeling of someone playing with his hair is both painfully foreign and familiar, as Dream lets him lean on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," he says again, and a shuddery breath leaves Fundy's lips.

For a moment, they just watch the stars, Dream's hand in his hair as he picks at a loose thread at the edge of his jacket. They're sitting at the edge of L'manburg, he thinks it's called again, and beautiful paper lanterns light the area around them. Wilbur said he used to make them with Phil with a sort of childish, wondering tone, and Fundy remembers how bitter he had felt when he heard it because they'd made them too, once upon a time. Wilbur had been the one to guide his hands over the thin paper, helping him fold along the lines he had marked with a bright red crayon, before he lit the candle inside and let Fundy lift the whole ensemble in the air, gently, to watch it rise in the dusky lavenders and navy blues of twilight, and Wilbur  _ didn't remember _ .

"I don't remember my dad," Dream says, suddenly, one of his hands closing gently around Fundy's own, easing it out of the fist he hadn't even realized he made. "Or my mom, for that matter. But I guess that's the way it went on the worlds we lived in."

"You have a sister, right?"

Dream cracks a smile. "Yeah, Drista. Managed to get her outta there pretty quick, somehow. It's good that I did. Kids didn't tend to last too long on anarchy servers."

Fundy nods against his chest as Dream's thumb runs over his knuckles, Dream's heart beating steadily against his ears and lulling him into calm. "Mmhm."

"Met Sapnap there, actually. Probably when I was- eight? And he was six or seven. Best alliance I ever made. Meant that we could actually fight, instead of just hide. You needed to be able to fight to get any real money. S'how we managed to get Drista away so early."

"I didn't know you grew up on an anarchy server."

"Mmhm," Dream's voice is low and soft as his fingers work out a knot of hair at the nape of his neck. "Bad found me and Sap, a couple of years later. I was- gosh, 13?" He laughs quietly. "We were, like, half-feral. Pretty sure Sap nearly bit him."

"Is that how you ended up at Munchy?"

"Yeah. Met most of the crew there, Ant and Sam and everyone." His voice suddenly lifts, and Fundy doesn't have to look up to know that there's a smiling stretching over his face, doesn't need the mask to be off to know that his eyes have lit up. "And George!"

"D'you know what happened to your parents? At all?"

For a moment, Dream stills, the hand in Fundy's hair pausing in the middle of smoothing the fur of one of his ears, and Fundy feels his breath catch in his throat as the world seems to stutter to a stop. Another moment passes, and everything moves again.

"No," Dream doesn't sound angry, or sad, or anything, and a twinge of jealousy squeezes his heart painfully before he pushes it away. "But there were lots of orphans, there, that did. Some still looked for their parents. Some just mourned. Most of them were just angry."

"I'm just another basket case to you, huh?" The words slip out the moment they take form in his mind, and he regrets them as soon as they hit the night air, impossible to retrieve, impossible to take back, but Dream just laughs without sounding like he really means it and the hand that's around Fundy's squeezes a little harder.

"We're all basket cases, here. You're handling it better than a lot of people."

Fundy notes that he dodged the question, nearly presses the point, before giving up. What would be the point? They fall back into silence as Fundy resumes picking at the frayed edge of his jacket. It's his black one with the colorful stripes, and it feels so good to wear it again; it doesn't bear the shoulder-patches and golden buttons that screamed L'manburg (screamed  _ Wilbur _ ), but it's also not the stifling shirt and tie that had been  _ wrong wrong wrong  _ under Schlatt. It's just a jacket, frayed at the edges but still comfortable, well-worn. His.

Not a lot of things have been  _ his _ , for a long time. Under Wilbur, he'd been his father's  _ little champion _ , coddled and babied at every turn, even when kids younger than him fought on the front lines (his uncles, though the thought made his head spin and he'd long since resolved to stop trying to understand how their crazy family tree worked). Under Schlatt, he had no option other than to stick close, be the dictator's right-hand man, plaster on a smile and get to work systematically destroying his home in the hopes that it would be enough to bring his father back, keeping his loyal façade up despite the stench of alcohol and sweat and penning his book in the dead of night.

Dream sighs. "You're not just a basket case, Fundy," and deliberately brushes his thumb over the golden band resting on his ring finger. Fundy knows that the other man doesn't wear his on his hand, for practicality's sake, but that a diamond-studded band of his own rested on the chain he always wore around his neck. He leans a little harder on his fiancé, hoping that it says the apology he cannot seem to voice.

"Sometimes," Fundy says instead, his voice dropping because the thought scares him with how  _ awful  _ it is, "I wish that he never came back at all."

His eyes close automatically as he flinches for the reprimand, the  _ how could you say that _ and  _ he's your father  _ and  _ you don't mean it _ that never comes. Instead, Dream makes that low, humming sound of acknowledgment again that sounds so  _ understanding  _ that it makes Fundy want to punch something.

"Yeah," Dream says, instead of anger, instead of shock. "I can see why."

His mind- blue-screens, honestly, because Fundy just said that he doesn't want his  _ father  _ to be there, would rather his  _ dad  _ be dead than alive (or semi-alive, or whatever it is you called it when your dad is a semi-corporeal amnesiac ghost), and Dream reacted to it as if Fundy had commented on the weather. Dream's lips quirk into a sort of awkward smile as he looks over, hair silvery-grey in the moonlight.

"He was your dad, sure. But he never really acted like it, did he?"

There's a moment where Fundy can't really do anything but look at his fiancé, haloed in light, holding him in the cold, one hand tangled in his hair and the other intertwined with his own, and swallow. A thousand memories bounce in his head: Dad, murmuring  _ my little champion  _ into his hair when he was five, Dad, carrying him over to visit the ocean, for the first time, Dad, looking proudly over a flag made of woven wool and exclaiming  _ L'manburg, this place is L'manburg _ , Wilbur, watching uselessly as they are shot at with arrows and fire, Wilbur, pinching his cheeks  _ (my little champion)  _ and ignoring the way he squirms out of the way, Wilbur,  _ we'll run as a single party _ , Wilbur, looking at him like he's a stranger,  _ my traitor son _ -

Wilbur, slumped to the ground in a hole carved in a mountain, blood dripping down its rocky face, surrounded by the broken remnants of a nation he destroyed.

Dream holds him as he falls apart, whispering soothing words as he screams and cries and demands  _ why, why, why  _ into the air, holding his hands so he cannot slam them into the dirt and letting him rage until he's too tired to keep yelling. Through it all, Dream's heartbeat is a steady rhythm in his ears, keeping him grounded and present as it feels like the world is shifting beneath his feet.

When he finally feels like he can speak again, even though his voice is tremulous, soft, he asks. "Do you think he'll ever remember?"

"I don't know. I haven't talked to him much."

"I think he can," Fundy says, tired. He's so, so tired now, after all of that, and wants to just crash in a bed and sleep for a week. "I think he just doesn't want to."

He wonders if Dream will push.  _ Help him remember _ , he imagines him saying.  _ It'll help you get closure, finally. _

Instead, Dream holds his hands, brings him face to face with the mask. "You don't owe him anything, ok?" His voice is painfully sincere, firm but kind. "You've never owed him anything. You're your own person. It's ok to move on."

_ It's ok to let go. _

Fundy watches the polished face of the mask for a moment longer, breathing deeply. The air is cold and clear.

Wilbur had always made a habit of running away when things got hard. He ran away from the SMP to make his own country when his drug operation got caught. He ran away from L'manburg when things went down, there, and never came back for those he left behind under a dictator's thumb. He ran away from victory because he couldn't deal with the consequences of winning and ruling a country again. He ran away from the consequences after detonating the TNT, begging Phil to kill him so he didn't have to see how everyone would react to their beloved leader becoming the thing they hated most. And now, as a ghost, he was still running from the consequences of his actions, refusing to face the pain he felt and the pain he forced on others and making everyone clean up the mess he left behind.

For a moment, Fundy thinks he sees a pair of eyes, semi-transparent, watching him from behind Dream, and he looks away.

"Ok," he smiles, closing his eyes. He has everything he needs, right here. "I'll be ok."

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading this hot mess,, i just. was watching fundy's stream today and just. hshhshs fundy's character makes me Cry, between everything he's gone through and everything he's still going through, and i just want. Someone to give him support. 
> 
> ik i kinda made Dream look a little too overpowered or whatever in this, bc i wanted Someone to be fundy's support and was gonna do Phil but just judging from today's stream that would've been so awkward, bc Fundy still doesnt really know Phil and Phil's still struggling with reconciling his idea of Wilbur with the Wilbur that destroyed L'manburg with Ghostbur and though he's trying to prioritize Fundy's mental health even as Ghostbur unknowingly destroys it he still doesn't really *get* what's happened between the two of them. Dream's Fundy's fiancé, and he's been There for all of this, so he seemed the better fit. Just pretend that they've already had a long talk about the blowing up L'manburg thing (and that comes mostly from Dream having a hard time rationalizing consequences in this universe, bc he *did* grow up in a place where people just like, Died. A Lot.) 
> 
> I love Ghostbur and Wilbur plays his character SO freaking well but i wrote this mostly bc people have to realize that like, though ghostbur is arguably *better* than like, willing to blow everything up to kingdom come Wilbur Soot, he's still really goddamn selfish a lot of the time and Fundy's not obligated to forgive him or give him a second chance. When Fundy needed a dad, Wilbur wasn't there. he was the opposite of there. And now that Fundy's moving on from that, Ghostbur cannot linger on what he *wants* reality to be. he failed, with his son. it's time he moves on.
> 
> ANYWAYS, moving on from that very long analysis and ramble, thank you very much for reading!! kudos and comments are, as always, very much appreciated. Thank you so much <3 and have a great day !!


End file.
